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Author Jonathan Lethem struggles to find a quiet spot at the corner of Broadway and 59th in midtown Manhattan as sirens wail and horns blare like the soundtrack to one of his own jangling, hyper-urban novels. “It's kind of a jungle,” he shouts, while the cacophony grows, drowning out his eloquent commentary on life, literature and his own latest novel, Chronic City .

But what could be more appropriate? Made famous as the unofficial novelist laureate of a different New York borough by two previous works, Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Lethem (pronounced leethem) crosses the East River in a big way with Chronic City, a delirious account of the life in the belly of a fantastic beast called Manhattan.

“ But I'm no longer that outsider ... I'm Norman Mailer now!”

“I got so identified with Brooklyn with those two other books that this one feels like some kind of transgression,” says Lethem, who visited Toronto this week on the only Canadian stop of an extensive tour promoting the new novel. But he wants fans to know that, despite the persistent son-of-Brooklyn legend, he was actually born in Manhattan, went to school there and “got the pavement under my feet” more than well enough to prepare for his first literary crossing.

“It's also an ordinary place,” he says of Manhattan.

But not in Chronic City. Lethem's city is a giddy and grotesque place where socialites swirl happily despite a permanent grey fog that envelopes the financial district, where a two-storey-tall burrowing tiger rampages uptown and snow falls in summer. Its amenities include a “war-free” edition of The New York Times to please the bleeding hearts and its gayest gossip concerns the plight of a lovelorn astronaut on a crippled spaceship trapped in an extraterrestrial field of “Chinese mines.”

Its main narrator is the astronaut's boyfriend, a retired child actor named Chase Insteadman who shares what Lethem calls “my own rather passing and mediocre version of celebrity.” Its hero is the even more outrageously named Perkus Tooth, an unemployable former rock critic wreathed permanently in his own fog of marijuana fumes and locked in the grip of cultural obsession so severe it threatens to become an alternate reality, rampaging Manhattan like the giant tiger.

And its point of view is consciously that of the famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover showing a map of North America that peters into an insignificant barrens beyond midtown Manhattan. “I wanted to do the Steinberg cartoon as if it were the basis of a novel by Gogol or something,” Lethem shouts above the sirens.

Gogol?

“You know, one of those gigantic morbid cartoons that Gogol specialized in.”

The horns blare. “They're holding a special party for us here today,” he says.

Stoner ontology and cheeseburger cuisine mix in Chronic City to create a wholly original vision of what Lethem calls the ultimate “solipsistic playground” of Manhattan. “But also there's something very fragile or innocent about being inside a bubble like that,” he adds. “I wanted to capture both sides of it. The novel is not strictly an attack on Manhattan narcissism. I wanted to say what a beautiful daydream this place is.”

Critical reaction is likewise divided into two distinct sides – often expressed in the same review. Chronic City has been called “brilliant but bloated,” “ingenious and unsettling,” “often intoxicating but occasionally irritating,” “a major disappointment” and, succinctly, “very strange.”

Once a young lion who could do no wrong, Lethem, 45, was prepared for the controversy. “I was a dark horse for a long time, a kind of secret cult object, and people never bothered knocking you down because you never had any power in the conversation to begin with,” he says. “But I'm no longer that outsider. For better or worse I'm stuck in the middle of the conversation – and so of course I'm going to take knockdowns all the time. It's the job of a middle-aged novelist writing bloated, ambitious books as I am now.”

He's good with the bloat. “I'm Norman Mailer now!” he marvels. “That's great. It's all good.”

Lethem's response to the two biggest stories of 21st-century Manhattan – 9/11 and financial collapse – was to obscure them in a literal fog, modifying the Steinberg view to push downtown as far off his personal map as Mexico. Chronic City 's universe is the Upper East Side. Like Seinfeld for stoners, its action is the seemingly inconsequential stuff of daily life, with the question of which diner to patronize looming as large as the existential puzzles suggested by chronic marijuana consumption.

That was the hard part, according to Lethem. “Conversation and hanging out and friendship is an enormous part of my life, and it's hard to make it work in a novel,” he says. “It's hard to put it in and not have it seem like nothing at all.”

What he tries to show in Chronic City, he adds, is how these quirky psychic villages become essential to survival in a metropolitan maze made universal by the Internet – a hyper-urban chaos freed from the constraints of both geography and conventional notions of what's real.

“I'm interested in the ways people try to make an ordinary, sane circuit of existence for themselves out of the immensity of contemporary life,” he says. “The way people function inside an impossible city like New York City is a precursor to the contemporary problem of how to live under total globalization and media overload.”

Is that the noise of a giant tiger in the background, disrupting infrastructure with its restless digging? Or is it just the usual tangle of yellow cabs and cube vans, horns blaring? The author won't say, cautioning against “yearning for a simpler time and place that gets to be called realism.” Viewed from the belly of the beast, reality is a mere convention.

“But look at the world we're in!” Lethem declares. “What fantastic possibilities are already in front of us.”